


The Fall

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [9]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Blood and Gore, Gen, Loss of Limbs, daemon AU, falling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:56:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5469017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa does not go gently into the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for that terrible summary. I just couldn't resist - accurate poetry is accurate. 
> 
> Also, please please let me know if you think of anything I should tag this with! I've upped the rating from gen. audiences to teen, and it's probably only going downhill from here. But honestly, I am very terrible with rating things based on the people who should be ok to read this.

She reached out. Instinct. Something in the dark to slow her fall. 

Aurelio had his claws dug into her skin, her arm, her muscle. Didn’t matter, the little eagle couldn’t hold her up, she was not hollow-boned like him. He strained his wings, screamed with her when her fingers caught in the huge chains that held up the lift. 

Her body slammed against the thick steel links, fingers instantly broken but still attached. Furiosa tangled her arm in the chain, securing her hold. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough. But she was alive, still, and Aurelio pulled his claws free of her arm. She could not afford to pay attention to the blood that greased her skin, that dripped onto her face from the fingers that didn’t hurt yet, but would in a second. She couldn’t pay attention to the hurt then, either, so anticipating it was of no use. 

“How far up?” Furiosa whispered. Her voice seemed to echo through the open cave, but there was no one around to hear it. She could see moonlight, stars, across the open chasm between her and the ground. And freedom. Joe had tossed her from the Vault, and the Imperators had tossed her off the lift, but she was alive to spite them. Freedom was just below her, close enough to touch, if only she could get there. 

“It’s at least another fifty feet.” Aurelio muttered, clinging sideways to the chain above her broken hand. 

“Can’t make that.” 

“You might.” Even as he said it, the daemon didn’t believe it. “The Mothers used to tell stories of falling from brooms a hundred feet up.”

Furiosa absolutely did _not_ sob at his mention of the Green Place. She was beginning to think she’d imagined the whole thing. That there was nothing but these hideous towers and their rank warrens, the white paint and black eyes and the ever-present dust. “Those were just stories, Aurelio,” she said, imagining that it was only the pain in her hand and arm that made her voice so tight. “They weren’t real.” 

“You just have to fall right,” he said, craning his feathered neck towards the ground. “Keep your body loose. Aim to land on side or shoulders, not feet first.”

“Or head first,” Furiosa mumbled, but the iron was so _cold_ against her skin. That seemed more important somehow than Aurelio’s analysis. 

“Furiosa!” Her daemon spoke sharply, pecking at her arm. “Stay awake! _Furiosa!_ If you fall unconscious so will I!” 

“Survive,” she gasped out her mother’s last word, reached out to grab the chain with her free hand. “We’ll do it, Mother.”

“That’s right,” Aurelio said, sliding down the link he was perched on to come closer to her face. “We can do this, Furiosa. We can survive this.” 

She groaned, gritting her teeth as she tried to get a better grip on the huge chain. She pulled her tangled arm further into the steel links, stuck her bare foot into a gap below and wrapped her free hand around the freezing iron. She had nothing but the white wraps of a Wife to shield her from the desert winter, and the wind kept snatching at the edges of her clothing, like the snatching fingers of Rictus and the Imperators at her heels. 

It happened both suddenly and very slowly. Furiosa both remembered the moment with vivid clarity and could not remember what led up to the exact second the chain shifted, and her tenuous hold turned into a tearing prison that was shredding her arm. Up above, she heard the movement of the huge gears that kept the counterweights balanced; and she was screaming but she didn’t know if they could even hear her over the grinding of the gears, the terrible pressure and _pain_ and the crunch of pulped bone. She was going down, she’d gotten one of the excess lift chains somehow. But it didn’t matter, because she was screaming and clawing at her own arm and Aurelio was beating his wings about her head trying to help, and then there was a wet tearing sound (like soaked fabric, sturdier than the Wives’ cloth, being ripped up for rags to practice sewing with, and come _on_ Val it’s not that hard to tear it, look…) 

 

 

 


	2. The Test

She fell. It was what she could assume, anyway. By the time she hit the ground, she was unconscious. Maybe they lowered the lift to find her body, though she couldn’t imagine why. By the time she was conscious again, she was alone in the sand. Aurelio was a pile of feathers, maybe twenty feet away. Their limit was a little bit further than that, but she pushed herself up and scooted closer to him anyway. The push reawakened every pain she had, including a sluggish but worrying blood flow from the ragged remnants of her arm. 

Furiosa sat and stared at it for a while, helplessly fascinated. She was going to be sick. She was going to faint. She was going to die, here in the sand, like she should have from the start. Broken bits of bone poked out from the wound, and torn skin waved a little in the breeze. Dust and dirt was already covering her arm, but the blood was doing an alright job of cleaning that out. 

“Furiosa.” Aurelio rolled over onto his feet, his voice wavering and weak. 

“Here,” she said, without looking away. She couldn’t even remember how _begin_ treating a wound like this. Was it possible? Her promise echoed in her mind, words heavy with the weight of lives. After all, they had been infused with her mother’s. She’d died of her wounds, and Furiosa had spent more than a week with the corpse in a trader’s cell, Joe’s men haggling over her like a bottle of rotgut. “A long day’s ride, heading east,” she mumbled, watching the blood drip out of her like water from the spigot in the Vault. 

“That’s right. We’re going to get back there. Just you wait,” Aurelio said, hopping forward. “Look at where we’re sitting, Furiosa. Outside. On solid ground. This is what we wanted.”

“I’m going to bleed out on solid ground,” she said, and it didn’t seem like a bad death. Better than bleeding out in the Vault for a different death, Joe and the Organic Mechanic hovering over her. 

“No you’re _not_ ,” Aurelio hissed, and he set his beak to tearing at her Wife’s wraps. “Help me rip bandages. We’ll tie it off. Come on.” 

 

She and Aurelio made it to the edge of the Citadel eventually, but even the cold, clean moonlight couldn’t help her take a step beyond its invisible borders. Furiosa fell more than sat, Aurelio’s sharp eyes glittering as he kept watch from her shoulder. He was forced to flutter to the ground as the uneven weight on her right side pulled her to the shifting sand, and Furiosa curled herself as tight as she could. “Broken leg,” she slurred out, listing her hurts as if the Little Eagle didn’t feel them as keenly as she did. “Oh. Head bleeding. Ribs broken.”

“Hopefully no internal bleeding.” Aurelio muttered. 

“Nnn,” Furiosa shook her head. “Not yet.”

“What else?” he started preening her dark hair, avoiding her bruises as best he could. 

“Besides my entire skin feeling shredded?” Furiosa hissed as his gentle preening caught on a clotted knot of blood and hair. “Just the arm.”

Aurelio froze, his feathers flattening in remembered fear. Then, hesitantly, he hopped down the sand to his human’s shortened arm, as silent as if they were already dead. 

“You know what we have to do,” she whispered. 

Aurelio shook his head, stepping away and bobbing nervously. But they were alone, as alone as they could be without being out in the wild Wastes. “No, no,” he said, the pitch of his voice rising with every repetition. “No. No. Furiosa, look at where we are! We can _leave_ , we can _escape_. This is what we’ve been hoping for.”

Furiosa laughed. It was the first time she had done so in over eight hundred days, and it would be three thousand more before anything loosely resembling a laugh bubbled up again. Even now it wasn’t a laugh so much as a bloody cough with no amusement in it. She spat out a gob of blood, black in the moonlight, and probed at the holes in her mouth with her tongue. 

“Look at me,” she said. “We can’t even walk out of here without falling down. And you know how long we drove before ending up here, through hostile territory. We wouldn’t last a day.”

“I could get us there,” he protested, a full-throated keen building in the back of his throat. “Furiosa, don’t make us do this.”

“We promised.” 

Aurelio could say nothing against that. “We don’t have to do it _this_ way,” he whispered, but Furiosa only shook her head. 

“We won’t die, Aurelio. We promised. And if we go back into the Citadel, he’ll recognize us.” 

Aurelio knew it. She could tell by her eagle’s posture, the way he wouldn’t look at her, the way his feathers lay flat so he looked emaciated in the darkness. Daemons were more identifiable than faces, and Furiosa did _not_ want Joe knowing what she had been. The girl who’d been kidnapped, watched her mother’s corpse rot, the girl who had born three dead children to a monster; that girl had fallen from a hundred feet. She hadn’t survived. 

There was a girl sitting in the cold sand, and her daemon was with her but not for long. The witches of the Waste kept old traditions, older than the fall of civilization. Among the Vuvalini, to become a woman, you and your daemon took a test. In some strange way, their last means of survival would bring them closer to the Green Place, to their history. Even if it hurt.

“Out here, everything hurts.” It was Furiosa who said it, for the first time. She’d thought, somehow, that it would hurt less once they were out of the Vault. There would be no Joe with his stench of rotting skin, no Organic Mechanic with his cold, sharp metal and his thick fingers. It was freezing out here, under the stars, so cold it hurt. And it was just another kind of hurt, not less, just different. 

“We still have each other,” Aurelio said, though he still wouldn’t look at her. “It hurts but we will hurt together, like it should be.”

“After the Test we’ll still have each other.” 

Aurelio keened softly, a sound that scraped at the edges of her nerves and throbbed behind her eyes. “It won’t be the same. Furiosa, please, we can find some other way.”

Furiosa didn’t have an answer for that. She lay silent in the sand, looking at anything but her the arm that ached but wasn’t there. And in the end Aurelio answered himself, because she wouldn’t and he already knew what needed to be said. 

“We don’t have time to find another way. We survive.”

“That’s what we do.” Furiosa rested her head on the sand. “You have to leave, Aurelio.”

“I know,” he said, and it wasn’t so much that he whispered as that there was no voice left to put behind his words. 

“Then do it.” 

“Furiosa–”

“DO IT!” She was shouting, and she didn’t care, and it would attract the attention of the Wretched looking for an easy kill, and she didn’t care, and her whole body hurt terribly with the force of her fall, and she didn’t care. It was nothing compared to the hurt she was going to feel.

Aurelio bobbed his head a few times, still wanting to argue. But Furiosa only closed her eyes, and after a moment he spread his wings and glided the thirty feet or so that they could live without pain. She didn’t look at him, walking away across the desert sand, but the hurt was so deep and so sudden that she cried out. Across the sand, Aurelio shrieked with her, but he kept walking. This was what it was to be one of the Many Mothers. This was what it would take to survive. An eagle’s footprints in red sand, and blood still soaking into her bandages, and the loneliest hurt any human could feel, so deep it pressed into her bones.


End file.
